Unpop Culture

With the amount of time I have taken to write about Jennifer Lawrence, one might assume either that I am obsessed with her or that I have something against her. Neither is true. It just so happens that my desire to write about loving our entertainers as we love ourselves keeps intersecting with news developments related to Jennifer Lawrence. And so I keep writing about her. #SorryNotSorry In a recent blog entry , I examined Lawrence’s starring role in the sexually violent film Red Sparrow , and how she claimed in an interview that the movie helped her feel empowered. After being the victim of a photo hack that released nude pictures of Lawrence onto the internet, her choice to go nude (and much more) for Red Sparrow allowed her to reclaim what the photo hack had stolen: her autonomy. To a degree, I get where Lawrence is coming from. The sexual offenses committed against her in real life took place without her consent, so she turned the tables (so to speak) by willingly particip...

I’m not quite sure what it was that teed me off initially. Our Sunday morning started innocently enough: we woke up and began the process of getting ready for church—something that involves more gymnastics these days, now that we have a newborn daughter. (I’ve never had to deal with projectile poop before.) I was finishing changing my daughter’s diaper when she spat up, ruining the outfit I had just wrestled her back into. Seeds of impatience sprouted out of my mouth: “Your timing sucks,” I told my uncomprehending daughter. After switching out her clothes, I brought her out of the room, only to encounter our cat in front of me, seemingly determined to get tangled up in my legs as I walked. Juggling a baby and dribbling a cat aren’t activities you want to combine. “You’re really stupid, you know that?” I barked at the cat. (Huh. Pun not intended.) In response, my wife Shannon put out her arms and asked for the baby, advising me to take my shower so I could be alone for a while...

The Expulsive Power paraphrase Part 4 To do your best at any particular job, you want to use the most effective tools. Trying to deny worldliness without faith is the same as trying to work without the right set of tools. As we have begun to see, the most effective tool—indeed, the only effective tool—for turning us from lovers of the world into lovers of God is the gospel. It is only in the gospel that God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners. It is only in the gospel where our desire for Him is not chilled by the barrier of guilt that hinders every approach not made through Christ, our mediator (1 Timothy 2:5). The gospel brings us hope, with which we draw near to God. To live without hope is to live without God, and if the heart is without God, the world will then have control over it. The world’s control over the heart is destroyed only when a person sees and embraces God as revealed through Christ. Then we no longer look on God with terror as an ...

The Expulsive Power paraphrase Part 3 The command to withdraw one’s affections from earthly things is, to the worldly man, the same as a call for his self-extinction, since his affections are set on nowhere but the world and cannot be transferred elsewhere. He may have a strong sense of the futility of life, but he will resist any attempt to shift his heart’s tendencies away from this life. To him, all such attempts are impractical. Based on the wisdom of this world, he considers himself beyond such ideas as setting our affections on things above (Colossians 3:2), or walking by faith (2 Corinthians 5:7), or having no confidence in the flesh (Philippians 3:3), or having our citizenship in Heaven instead of on earth (Philippians 3:20). When he observes these “overly spiritual” principles, the worldly person decides that Christianity is impossible to carry out. He does not see the love of God in sending His Son into the world. He does not see the tenderness of God toward...

We’ve all been there—at that place where we feel like God is far away. For whatever reason, our relationship with the Lord seems strained, cold, even severed. We know we need spiritual refreshment, but we’re blocked by a wall that seems too high to cross and too wide to get around. During a time when I was aware of my own distance from God, the Holy Spirit spoke to me through Hebrews 4:16: “ Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” I realized that there are two main reasons why Christians don’t approach God: guilt and apathy. Ironically, these are the two reasons why God says we should approach Him. Hebrews 4:16 speaks directly to both our sinfulness and our shortcomings. Problem #1: Guilt Nothing deadens our affection for God like lingering guilt. Because we’re sinners, we do—and should—sense the reality that we have missed the mark and failed to glorify God as we ought. The problem comes ...

A “prodigal daughter” rebelled against her parents and ran away from home. Alone and in a different city, she turned to drugs and prostitution. Even after seeing a missing persons report with her face on it, she refused to contact her family. After a couple years, she found herself thrown out on the streets with no one to turn to—except her family. She called her parents and let them know she was taking a bus back home. Rand Alcorn relays this story (originally told by Philip Yancey ) in his book The Grace and Truth Paradox . I’ll let him finish: As she steps off the bus, she finds herself greeted by forty brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, and her parents, all wearing party hats, with a huge banner stretched out saying, “Welcome home.” Before she can finish saying “I’m sorry,” her father murmurs, “Hush, sweetheart, we’ll talk later. We’ve got to get you home to the party; there’s a banquet waiting for you!” This is just one of many stories told ...

I have a confession to make: I’m not a loving person. Actually, that’s probably putting it a bit too nicely. Sure, I can be agreeable and diplomatic. I’m not quick to butt heads or pick a fight. But the truth is, when it comes to displaying compassion, I am naturally as soft and snuggly as a slab of granite. To a certain degree, I think men in general can struggle with a tendency toward being harsh and unloving. Colossians 3:19 seems to indicate so: “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them” (ESV). Personal experience has shown me the power of this temptation toward harshness. Several months ago, on one particularly emotional evening, I isolated myself in the bedroom with my Bible, desperate for God’s help. I was angry and I knew I needed to demonstrate more tenderness and love to Shannon. ( Sound familiar ?) God showed up and rocked my world, displaying His tender love for me by drawing my attention to a short, three-letter Hebrew word: leb . It appears in ...

So there I was, surrounded by church members, my pants wet, my blood boiling. This wasn’t what I needed—at least, that’s what I told myself. The morning had started innocently enough. Shannon and I arrived at our church building later than normal. Because of the pouring rain and the packed parking lot, I said I would drop Shannon off at the front and then go park and bring our Bibles and notebooks in. (After all, with an umbrella and a raincoat at my disposal, my trek across the parking lot wouldn’t be too bad.) Shannon didn’t want me lugging the books in the rain, so she grabbed them before heading into the building. I then parked near the back of the lot and reached for the umbrella. It wasn’t there. Not in the back seat…not in the front seat. Not anywhere. Shannon must have taken it inside with her. Okay. No big deal. I still had my raincoat, and thanks to my memory of a once-watched YouTube video , I had learned the trick to staying relatively dry while traveling ...

As an amateur theologian with enough knowledge to make me dangerous, I have gotten myself in the thick of various pickles. (I’m mixing my metaphors, aren’t I? See, I’m dangerous.) Over the past few weeks , I might have inadvertently encouraged the pursuit of one such pickle: a loathing for the law of God. If all the law does is show me what I must but cannot do, then the law is basically nothing more than a constant reminder of my failures. That’s not much to celebrate, is it? Well, the truth is that we have been focusing on only one of the law’s uses, but it actually has three. It functions as a curb, a mirror, and a guide. A Curb First, the law “helps to control violent outbursts of sin and keeps order in the world” (Luther’s Small Catechism). In this respect, it doesn’t change human nature for the better. It simply restrains us from doing what we would otherwise do. A Mirror Second, the law “accuses us and shows us our sin” (Luther’s Smaller Catechism). It lets us se...

Did Jesus use a double standard when dealing with people? It almost seems that way. Generally speaking, He reacted harshly to the scribes and Pharisees while showing tenderness to the promiscuous and delinquent. It isn’t because only one of the groups was in the wrong—they both were. Hypocrisy and debauchery are both sins, so why treat some sinners with force and others with gentleness? The answer is the distinction between law and gospel . To quote an article in the Lutheran Study Bible , “ One of the principles of Law and Gospel is that the Law is used with unrepentant sinners and the Gospel is used with repentant sinners.” Or, to use the words of Martin Luther, “For this also must be noted: that as the voice of the law is brought to bear only upon those who neither feel nor know their sins…so the word of grace [i.e., the gospel] comes only to those who are distressed by a sense of sin and tempted to despair” ( Bondage of the Will ). The law’s purpose is to awaken a dead—or,...

If you’re a Christian, you’ve been saved by the gospel. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that you sufficiently understand the gospel. Just as it is easy to mistake the essence , purpose , and function of the law, so it is possible—and dangerously easy—to misinterpret the gospel itself. Yes, even believers can have a faulty view of the gospel—to the detriment of their Christian walk. Here’s a short quiz. Look at Genesis 12:2-3 and see if you can discern where the gospel is located. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. We can see that this is a promise, not a command. Therefore, God is speaking here with the voice of the gospel, not the law. We can be even more explicit than that, though. These verses are, in effect, the very gospel of Jesus Christ—on par with Paul’s st...

Have you ever sought to defend a cause only to end up proving something you didn’t mean to—like attempting to prove the existence of God only to find yourself backed into a corner? It’s a humbling, and evening a frightening, experience. Since I don’t think quickly on my feet, I have argued myself into a corner on more than one occasion. One such occasion (or a period of time, rather) involved the realization that I had misinterpreted more than half the Bible. Up until that point, I was convinced that the prominent use of Scriptural commands—“Choose this day,” “If you are willing to obey,” etc.—proved that those commands could be obeyed. But as last week’s post pointed out, such a conclusion is faulty. The conclusion is more than just faulty, though. It undermines the very faith on which we stand. You see, when we use the law to prove mankind’s ability, it ends up proving much more than we bargain for. It proves not just that we have some ability to follow after God; it proves...

In explaining the Lutheran distinction between law and gospel last week , I made the claim that the law does not show us what we can do; it simply shows us what we ought to do. Since that is a controversial statement, further explanations are in order. It is easy, and even logical, to assume that if the law only tells us to do things we cannot do, the law is meaningless. It only mocks us and makes light of our condition. That is the stance I had for most of my life, actually. Only when exposed to the keen Biblical insights of Martin Luther did I realize the fallacy of my reasoning. The law does not mock a person who is incapable of obeying it. In fact, by commanding the impossible, the law helps him. How? To answer, let me paraphrase an argument from Luther’s Bondage of the Will : Imagine a man with his hands bound behind his back, but who clearly and fully believes he can move his hands in any direction, whenever he wished. How could you best help this person? Well, by p...